Generation Kill - Evan Wright [66]
Burris says, “That’s insane, but okay.” He and his fellow Marines climb into their Humvee. They are ordered to start driving immediately. Ferrando and others in charge figure the effects of their artillery strike might wear off, and enemy shooters might regroup if given too much time.
Burris’s team, in the lead of Alpha and the entire battalion, race their Humvee up to about forty miles per hour as they make the final approach toward the town. Its dominant feature is the mosque, with its stunning, blue dome rising on the edge. To enter the town, Marines speed past high stucco walls on the left. Straight ahead there’s a three-story building with a row of tall, thin windows on the upper floor. It almost looks like the road goes straight into this structure, but instead it turns abruptly left, forcing the driver in Burris’s Humvee to hit the brakes as they cut into the town.
The street that had been a narrow lane on the outskirts becomes a broad, straight avenue, only now it’s filled with rubble, burned vehicles and downed telephone poles from Marine artillery strikes. The main thoroughfare, like a lot of others in Iraqi towns, has a claustrophobic feel, since it’s hemmed in on both sides with either high stucco walls or building fronts. The sky and the whole town before them are almost yellow from the dust storm. Wind blasts through the streets—and Burris’s open Humvee—at fifty miles per hour.
Burris hears shots, but it’s tough to see anything. The shamal winds sandpaper the lenses of the goggles the Marines wear. Some men remove the fogged goggles, but their eyes fill with tears from the dust. Burris glimpses three armed men in an alley and fires a 203 round in their direction. He has no idea if he hits them. Then Burris’s team hits a river of “crap water” running through the middle of the town—the result of a blown sewer main or, just as likely, the natural state of things in this impoverished place. Sewage sprays all over his face. Then he hears his Humvee’s driver and another Marine shouting, “Left or right?”—repeating it urgently.
There’s a T intersection ahead, and no one can figure out which way to go. They have the map out, ripping and flapping in the wind, and are trying to study it. “Left! Left!” one of them shouts, finally solving the puzzle.
They sideswipe a partially downed telephone pole, then, two to three minutes after entering Al Gharraf, they arrive on the western edge of the town, where Burris has his most terrifying moment of the invasion. Hundreds of Marines from RCT-1 are dug in, facing them with rifles, machine guns and Javelin, AT-4 and TOW missiles. Burris watches in horror as dozens of Marines drop their heads onto their sights, getting ready to open fire on his Humvee. He ducks, expecting a hail of bullets and missiles, but all he hears is the wind. Given the shaky communications between different Marine units, nobody in First Recon was completely confident the guys in RCT-1 waiting on the other side of the town would know they were coming. But the Marines in RCT-1—some of whom later say they were stunned when they saw First Recon’s Humvees careening out of the town they considered impassable—hold their fire.
FIRST RECON’S HEADQUARTERS and support units—many in lumbering, five- and seven-ton trucks—roll through Al Gharraf after Alpha Company. Enemy fire on the trucks remains intermittent, more on the level of pot shots, but one Marine officer riding in the convoy is amazed by the sheer chaos of it. Until several weeks earlier Major Michael Shoup, thirty-five, was working at the Pentagon as a budget analyst. Prior to that, Shoup was an F-18 “backseater”—weapons officer—and flew several combat missions over Kosovo. He volunteered to join First Recon as a forward air controller, responsible for calling in air strikes to assist the battalion. Today,